Night of the Swallow (Patreon)

Night of the Swallow

“Yet in the midst of this carnage [the Troubles], the hardheaded citizens of Belfast simply adapted and got on with their lives. In a momentary lull in the shooting, a front door would tentatively crack open and a Belfast housewife in horn-rimmed glasses would stick her head out to make sure the coast was clear. Then she would emerge, erect in her raincoat, a kerchief over her curlers, and walk primly through the war zone to the shops.”

— Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing.

Once again, we hit upon a game-changer that serves as an apotheosis to every Kate Bush song to date. Bush’s previous songs of this caliber, mostly notably “Wuthering Heights” and “Breathing,” were nebulously bucolic and evocative of a mythical English past colliding with the present neoliberal age. “Night of the Swallow” is as powerful as either of those songs. As pop music, it’s a contender for Bush’s finest hour, and it’s by a mile The Dreaming’s apogee.

The manner in which “Night of the Swallow” was recorded was new for Bush; a scrupulous matrimony of circumstances, technology, geography, and epoch. It sees The Dreaming’s postcolonialism come full circle as Bush engages with a culture she can reasonably claim as her own. “Night of the Swallow” is a straightforward Irish folk song recorded in Dublin with Irish session musicians playing traditional instruments. “Ever since I heard my first Irish pipe music it has been under my skin,” Bush wrote, “and every time I hear the pipes, it’s like someone tossing a stone in my emotional well, sending ripples down my spine.” The daughter of an Irish nurse, Bush had a personal attachment to Ireland, with a tenderness and genuine respect that her appropriation of Aboriginal struggles abnegated. “Night of the Swallow” pertains to a much less racially fraught ethos than “The Dreaming,” honing genuine affection and heritage rather than appropriation and colonization.

Like much of The Dreaming, “Night of the Swallow” synthesizes rock instruments and traditional folk sounds through a bouzouki and uilleann pipes. The song is built meticulously; Bush plays the hook on her piano, dominating the intro with keys and ambience. “The ni-HI-i-ight!” mournfully barks Kate, as if calling a squadron to attention, “doesn’t LI-IKE IT.” Immediately the song establishes a tone of sobriety matched by urgency, marching slowly forward, but in a mood that infers repressed fury and torment. “It’s funny how/even now/you’re laughing.” A lethargic, quietly objurgatory observation, followed by a terse declamation: “I won’t let you do it.” As the verse advances, Bush’s loyal rhythm section joins her piano, as Stuart Elliott martially rattles his drum kit, and Del Palmer’s bass menacingly contours their march. “If you go, I’ll let the law know!” Bush’s holler crystallizes things: this Irish folk song is grounded in geopolitics, trauma, and sociocultural terror.

Bush repeatedly intones “I won’t let you do it” even as her lover is “miles away” in “Dover,” (near Bush’s native Kent), to engage in a clandestine guerilla aerial raid under circumstances so shady the singer sounds unaware of its mission: “I’ll just pilot the motor/take them over the water/...with a hired plane/no names mentioned,” the runaway lover fails to reassure his partner that this mission is safe (“come on, they won’t even know I’m delivering weapons!”), only to be rebutted with “literally nothing about this is safe, what are you doing, you crazy son of a bitch?” The conflict is gendered; the man goes out to do battle, while the housewife wrings her hands at home. The song’s sympathies are ultimately with the latter, though, whose ululations of “give me something to show for my miserable life” exhibit trauma, horror, and despair of abandonment. The survival of women is a major component of war casualties; while Bush declines to divulge whether the singer’s lover survives, the drama is in that frozen state of trauma where she doesn’t know what’s going to happen. The people who are left behind in military conflicts often administer the surviving masses.

The obvious cultural background here is the Troubles. Bush is engaging with Ireland on a sonic level that ties into its recent political history. It’s rather subtle and small-scale in this pursuit, and better off for it —- while “The Dreaming” was flagrantly racist in the contours of its diatribe against Aboriginal genocide, “Night of the Swallow” infers a minor conflict of the kind that embodied the Troubles. As she does so, she taps into Irish culture respectfully. As Irish men were picked off by war and industrial trauma, their widows often took charge in their stead, readying themselves and their families for the struggles of poverty and sectarian violence. Patrick Radden Keefe’s book Say Nothing chronicles personal stories of Irish families during the Troubles, including a woman from Belfast, Jean McConville, widowed mother of ten children, who kept her family together until being disappeared one night by the Provisional IRA. McConville’s horrific murder is tragic in its own right, but murdered working class women have identities and struggles that precede their murders. McConville was “a widow with a meager pension but no paying job and all [ten of her] children to look after.” The English bourgeoisie wringed their hands about Sinn Fein and the Provisional IRA, but the idea that Thatcher or any of her cohort gave a moment’s thought to the British colonialist violence that bred sectarianism in Northern Ireland beyond how to exacerbate it is ludicrous.

McConville’s life and death is one of many anecdotes of Irish trauma, which neither diminishes nor obviates her tragic murder.

Propinquity is key to the success of “Swallow”; rather than generalizing a grand narrative of the Troubles, or even explicitly postulating the Troubles as a setting, Bush infers political drama through a set of aesthetics exploring the emotions of certain marginalized groups. Better yet, “Swallow” is a character piece about a “miserable life.”

The track’s acoustic-electric soundscape ties directly into The Dreaming’s aesthetics. “Swallow” was recorded in all three Abbey Road studios simultaneously, employing Studio 3 for Stuart Elliott’s drums, Studio 1 to record the ambience of Studio 3, and Studio 2’s console to record both sources of sound. The resulting sound is at once epic and intimate, matching acoustic domesticity with electric modernity. It evokes a multiplicity of cultures and resonances: the martial beat of militarism cracks harshly against the back of subaltern trauma. Bush’s use of Irish musicians hailing from such bands as Planxty and The Chieftains further imbues “Night of the Swallow” with cultural integrity. As good as Bush has ever been.

(Bush, K.). Bush, K. — vocals, keyboards, production. Whelan — arrangements, engineering. O’Flynn — uilleann pipes, penny whistles. Elliott — drums. Palmer — bass (fretless, 8-string). Lunny — bouzouki.  Recorded at Abbey Road in spring ‘81. Trad. instruments rec. July ‘81 at Windmill Lane Studios, Dublin. Overdubs at Odyssey Studios Aug ‘81 - Jan ‘82. Mixed Mar – May ’82 at Advision Studios. Issued in Ireland 21 November 1983.